Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is no stranger to costly in-game cosmetics, but its latest super expensive mount is so popular it’s causing a shortage of WoW Tokens in the in-game auction house.
The mount in question is the Trader's Gilded Brutosaur, which you can see in the screenshot below.
What’s so special about it, and why does it cost an eye-watering $90? It comes with a 20th Anniversary themed harness encrusted with gems representing World of Warcraft’s expansions. But beyond that, it features actually useful systems not normally found on mounts: it lets you check the in-game auction house and the mail while riding it out and about the world of Azeroth via characters Morten and Killia riding alongside the beast.
Fueling the mount’s popularity is Blizzard’s decision to make it only temporarily available for purchase. It plans to pull it from the World of Warcraft store on January 6, 2025, so players know they only have a few months before it’s (potentially) gone forever.
To put the cost of this mount into context, it’s the same price as the deluxe edition of World of Warcraft’s latest expansion, The War Within, or about half a year’s subscription to the long-running MMO.
Still, some players are saying the Trader’s Gilded Brutosaur is a bargain at $90, and that’s because paying real-world money directly for it compares favorably to the price you’d have to pay if you were to buy it with WoW Tokens.
WoW Tokens can be exchanged for Battle.net Balance, not just game time, which means players can buy anything Blizzard sells for real-world money with in-game gold. Here’s how it works: players can buy a WoW Token from Blizzard for $20, and either keep it for later or put it on the in-game auction house. Another player will then buy that token from the auction house for in-game gold, then use that token to get game time or $15 of Battle.net Balance (Blizzard effectively takes a $5 tax from the transaction), which can then be used to buy anything Blizzard sells for World of Warcraft for real-world money, including $90 mounts.
This method relies on players selling WoW Tokens in the game’s auction house, and right now they’re scarce because so many players are buying them in order to buy this mount. Because of that, WoW Tokens are selling out fast, and so the price is going up (economics!), driving the effective cost of this mount in WoW Tokens bought with in-game gold to over $600.
"The auction house's WoW Token right now is out of WoW Token supplies since you need suppliers to supply the demand, and currently skyrocketing given the 3% price cap per 20 minutes," redditor arasitar explained. "WoW Token was 200k on NA. Probably going to go to 400k in a short bit."
What does this all tell us? Not much that we didn’t know about the World of Warcraft community, anyway. Mounts have, over the years, proved incredibly popular no matter how much money they cost to buy. Indeed, a near-identical mount was released in 2018 alongside the Battle for Azeroth expansion that sold like hot cakes, too. World of Warcraft players love their mounts!
For Blizzard, it’s laughing all the way to the bank. Or, as redditor Chuckieshere put it: “This mount probably just made more money than StarCraft 2 for 1/1000th of the effort.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
